In early 2006, we linked to Daniel Henninger’s piece on James Frey:
Oprah Winfrey has thrown her support behind memoirist James Frey, whose Number One bestseller, “A Million Little Pieces”–a vivid recollection of his drug and alcohol addictions, crimes against humanity and recovery–turns out on a sliding scale to run from false to faulty. Mr. Frey’s literally incredible life was exposed recently by a Web site, the Smoking Gun. Respondeth Oprah, and legions of Mr. Frey’s readers: Who cares?
Ms. Winfrey said, “The underlying message of redemption in James Frey’s memoir still resonates with me.” Many of the some 1,900 Frey messengers to Oprah’s Web site also voted for redemption over factual accuracy.
In an age when controversies are a dime a dozen, this one is worth thinking about. Some have said the publisher should have made clear the memoir was fictionalized. But people don’t want that. As with reality TV shows, people now enter into these new kinds of experiences with the conceit that it’s somehow true or real, and when they find out later the truth was staged, they don’t care. If you think this doesn’t compute, tough. That, so to speak, is current reality.
Still, criticism has rained down on Mr. Frey, publisher Doubleday and Oprah for choosing falsity over fact. Most of this comes from authors or teachers of writing defending what they think are utilitarian distinctions between fiction and nonfiction. One might expect that most people would similarly support the primacy of facts in a book making claims to factuality, as Mr. Frey’s did. The recent, wide denunciation of Korean stem-cell faker Hwang Woo Suk derives from the centuries-old belief that improving the human condition works better in a world run on facts rather than tall tales.
Eventually, Oprah very publicly tossed Frey overboard on her show, which Nan Talese, his publisher at Doubleday, describes here, and in a clip that’s currently being highlighted by Matt Drudge:
“And at the end of it she pulled James aside and said, ‘I know it was rough, but it’s just business.'”
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